by Luke Brown
‘I certainly am.’
‘Well, then, why can’t I be friendly to other men?’
‘I’m not saying you can’t. Of course you can. But not by comparing yourself to me. Who says my friendliness to women is proper?’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I mean it to be. Or more likely, I want something out of it.’
‘Friends.’
‘Yeah. But every time? Every time I talk to a woman in a bar I’m only after a friend?’
‘Are we talking about you or me here?’
‘I’m just saying it’s easy to lie to yourself. I’ve spent my whole life trying to make people like me and I thought I’d got to be quite good at it. I feel at home with women. I love the conversation of women, the thoughts of women, the company of women. And I love the bodies of women, the touch of women. Being with Sarah hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make women like me. It’s addictive and vain. And sometimes it’s friendly. And sometimes … I don’t know.’
‘Liam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘That’s you, that’s not me.’
‘Well, maybe it’s a male thing.’
‘Desire and vanity are not male things. I’m not even sure if self-indulgence is either, despite what often seems like overwhelming evidence. You sound like you’re just being too hard on yourself.’
‘That’s not what Sarah thinks.’
‘Liam, what have you done?’
I really wanted to tell her. I wondered if I could. ‘I … I don’t know. I used to agree with you. I thought you could do things that aren’t you, that are a lie in themselves, an experiment in character. And if you tell someone about them you make them more true than if you didn’t.’
‘The thing is to not do them in the first place.’
‘Of course.’
‘But sometimes you do do them.’
‘Regrettably.’
‘Let’s get some more beers,’ she said, waving the waiter over. ‘I haven’t told this story to anyone. Can I trust you?’
‘Of course,’ I promised.
‘You’ve heard the beginning of the story, when you asked how I met Arturo.’
‘At his gig. You grabbed him to have your way with him.’
‘I grabbed him but I didn’t have my way with him, not that night.’
‘Oh?’
‘He was, he is, such a sexy kisser. I wanted to. But it’s a risk with you idiots, putting out on the first night. Some of you get bored if there’s nothing to chase, start assuming that if it was that easy it can’t be worth it.’
‘Not me. I’m always overwhelmingly grateful.’
‘Always? Anyway, you’re aware of the phenomenon. So I didn’t go back with him. I took his number and he had work early so he left. I don’t think I mentioned I was on a pill when I first kissed him. I didn’t tell Arturo at the time actually. But I was on a pill, a really strong one, and regretting not going home with him, feeling really, really horny. I got talking to this guy Hernán and he took me off for a line in the toilets and then I was in such a wild mood … I mean, it’s OK to fuck people you don’t really like, isn’t it? It’s people you do really like who you can’t just fuck.’
I kind of admired her logic. A few months earlier I would have found it profound and true. But my rule was simple now: don’t fuck anyone, ever.
‘Obviously it’s important not to make the wrong impression,’ I said.
‘I knew you’d understand. Except, you’ve met Hernán – the singer in Arturo’s band. That Hernán. I was so out of it and wrapped up in Arturo I didn’t even notice the guy I was getting off with was his singer until six weeks later when I saw Arturo’s band again, sober, and watched Hernán stare right at me from the centre of the stage for the whole performance. I hadn’t returned any of his calls, and by this time Arturo and me are properly together, have had this wonderful month exploring the city together. And Hernán has known all along who Arturo’s new girlfriend is but doesn’t seem to have said anything to him – I don’t think he’s told him, anyway, at least not directly. I think he likes having this secret over me, to insinuate he knows something about me. If he has said something, it’s worse, and it’s Arturo and him who like having this hold on me. But I don’t think it’s that. Arturo’s too confrontational to keep something like that to himself. I do my best not to go to the gigs now, to find excuses, but they keep playing more and more.’
I thought of the look on Hernán’s face as he had watched Arturo flirt with the girl after his gig last week.
‘Lizzie, you didn’t do anything that bad – why don’t you just tell him?’
‘I think I missed my chance. It’s so stupid, that embarrassment can grow something so small into such an enormous lie. I feel like I’ve got a bomb ticking under me. What do you think I should do?’
I didn’t know. I was worried she was right, that there is a point beyond which telling the truth can still stand in your favour. I had been miles beyond this point when I had told the whole truth to Sarah about the half-night stand I’d had in Frankfurt, but who was to say Lizzie wasn’t slightly beyond it now, with the same consequences? The people out there who never lied, they were so intolerant of we who did. Was it really their courage or just their lack of imagination?
I wanted to believe it was courage. I wanted to believe that this could be me. I decided then that I would tell Lizzie about my split with Sarah. In a minute I decided I would tell her.
Lizzie had stubbed the joint out before it was finished and she lit it again before we went back into the exhibition. This time I enjoyed the high and winked at the girl on the desk as we went past. We slid through the galleries, talking less, caught up in our own impressions. I could almost pretend I had a girlfriend again. I moved up to Lizzie, who was staring at an enormous mural, and I opened my mouth to speak –
‘Don’t you dare tell me the name of the artist, where he’s from, who his sister was or how he faced the challenge of the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. I’m enjoying looking at this.’
‘Lizzie,’ I said. ‘I have a confession to make.’
‘Yes,’ she giggled, and I felt so happy at that moment I could not spoil it.
‘Lizzie. I know nothing about Latin American art.’
‘Is this you being charming again?’ She pretended to yawn.
‘I came here yesterday and memorised all the texts on the placards. That’s why I recognise so much of the art and know about the artists. I looked them up on Wikipedia.’
That stopped her yawning. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘To impress you with my erudition.’
‘But that would make you a complete psycho –’
‘“Beginning in 1957, coinciding with the space race, Forner’s attention turned to imagined scenes of interplanetary travel” –’
‘Stop it! You are a psycho. So all that pointing and pondering before, that was all an act to impress me?’
‘It was.’
She screwed up her fact in disgust and looked me up and down. Then she punched me in the arm and laughed.
‘That’s brilliant,’ she said admiringly.
Chapter 10
Living begins to look possible when you have a friend; the world lightens. I hugged Lizzie goodbye, though it was perhaps more of a don’t-go hug. She extricated herself in the end, and we arranged to go for dinner with Arturo later in the week. In the meantime she offered to ask around to see if she could find me an apartment; she thought she knew a colleague at her college who was looking to sublet his place for three months while he went travelling. She talked me through other practical matters too: where to buy a cheap mobile phone, what I would need to get a library card if I wanted somewhere quiet to work.
The mobile was a good idea and I immediately went and bought one. My mum would be happier now I had a number she could call me on. It hadn’t escaped me that there was a precedent for my sudden flight: my father’s disappearance. I worried I was making the past present again, that time
when he left her for the woman who would so briefly become his second wife. His disappearance shortly after that completed the derangement and since I was sixteen I had never slackened the pace of intoxication. I was making sure to call Mum every week from a payphone, to email regularly and keep in touch with my sisters. But it was hard to keep up a conversation because the one thing I needed to talk about was the one thing I was still too ashamed to admit. It wasn’t that I minded admitting my faults but that I knew they’d understand and suffer any of my pain alongside me. I remembered looking at Mum the evening after Dad had gone, how the four of us multiplied by four every bit of sadness. I could still hear the echoes.
So I told them I had been suspended from the job, not sacked. I told them I was hoping Sarah would arrive soon. I changed the subject and made jokes. It must have worried them more than ever.
I had stopped trying to call Dad. I refused to chase him. But a couple of days after I had passed my new number on, one of my sisters must have had a rare conversation with him, for I was woken one morning at 5 a.m.
‘Hello. Dad? Do you know it’s five in the morning?’
‘No, it’s not, is it? It’s midday!’
‘You’re ahead of me.’
‘Definitely? I thought you were ahead of me.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Oh.’ He sounded crestfallen.
‘But now you’re here, how are you?’ I said, trying to cheer him up.
‘How am I? You’re in Argentina!’
‘I am that.’
‘And you’ve been suspended from your job?’
‘You’re only just getting started.’
‘Wow!’
‘You sound exhilarated. It’s generally regarded as a bad thing.’
‘It’s just rather spectacular. What are you going to do?’
‘No fucking idea.’
‘What about Sarah?’
‘I cheated on Sarah, and now she’s dumped me. It’s a disaster. I didn’t even do it properly, I just flirted with doing it and couldn’t go through with it and then lied and got caught out. Not that it matters. She says it’s the lying that destroyed things, not the cheating. And she doesn’t really believe me about the not cheating anyway. I wouldn’t if I were her.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Your sisters were concerned. They thought something might have happened. But you haven’t told them this.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Embarrassed? Ashamed? I don’t want them to know how miserable I am.’
‘Oh, Liam.’
‘You’re not allowed to tell them how miserable I am, by the way. Let’s share that together, us men.’
‘You make men sound like a horrible word.’
‘We make men sound like a horrible word.’
It had been years since I’d attacked my dad. At first I hadn’t dared to, in case he disappeared again. And after that, it was hard to summon the energy. The anger had retreated somewhere inside me, seeped into cracks and corners. Forgiveness, in its first stages, is more passive than active.
‘You don’t sound like you like yourself much at the moment,’ Dad said, eventually.
‘I’m trying to be a better judge of character. Do you like yourself?’
He sighed. The long sigh I recognised from years ago whenever I asked if he had rung my sisters recently, if he had taken their calls, arranged to see them. The refusal-to-think sigh. The running-away sigh. The sigh that ended the call.
‘Don’t fucking hang up,’ I said.
The sigh again.
‘I’m listening, Liam,’ he said. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. Tell me what happened.’
‘I don’t want you to be sympathetic. I don’t want you to make me feel better. I don’t want to feel bet –’
‘Liam,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
The morning after the best day of my life – it must have been years, but it felt like a day – I woke up in bed in another country with the wrong woman. I wished I didn’t remember how I got there but I did, meeting her that afternoon, staying out with her when the colleague I was sharing a flat with went home before me with the only keys. I had known full well that he would fall asleep drunk and not wake up. We’d ordered a bottle of champagne to her room in the Frankfurter Hof – just, I’d told myself, because I wanted someone to talk to; I had wanted someone to talk to. Cockburn, who had introduced me to her earlier, had seen his Frankfurt drug dealer Klaus earlier in the night and now neither Isabela, an Italian editor, nor I was ready to sleep. We lay on her bed and talked for hours and when she leaned over and kissed me I felt a surge in my heart, tasted rust on my lips, and let it go on and on, until I could not forget about her, until the lust for death turned into the perfect recollection of Sarah’s face. When I said I had to go – I would sleep on a park bench if I had to – Isabela started to cry. I told her I was in love with someone. She told me it was always the same, we were always in love with someone. She didn’t know how we behaved the way we did when we were in love with someone. Nor did I. I put my arms around her and held her against my chest. I reassured myself that I had not gone too far. I tried to reassure myself. That was when she fell asleep. I lay there with the perfect awful weight of her head on my chest and then I was dreaming, falling, dreaming more than I should have.
Chapter 11
The days were quiet then, Spanish in the morning, lunch with Hans, afternoons on the terrace writing in my notebook. The weather grew cooler. Every morning I scanned the shelves for a new arrival, a book I wanted to read, and went back disappointedly to sip from Bleak House. The narrator was unreasonably virtuous and made me feel the opposite. Every time I got excited about the story a new subplot and set of characters arrived to take it further away from me. The novel was brilliant, occasionally enjoyable, the last thing I needed and all I had. It was a cheap edition and its nine hundred pages were set so tightly I would occasionally lose focus and seem to stare at a blank book crawling with ants. But at least not having anything to read was forcing me to write. That was Chandler’s two very simple rules for writing a novel: four hours a day when, one, you don’t have to write and, two, you’re not allowed to do anything else. Eventually you write a novel just to keep from being bored. But Chandler’s study wasn’t on the top of a hostel roof constantly renewed with multinational young women (in bikinis, when it was sunny). More fool him. Nevertheless, I was getting some work done.
On the second night I asked Hans if he’d like to accompany me to the bar in San Telmo, where I was going to try to track down Alejandro Miguel Marques Montenegro.
‘Will Lizzie be coming?’ he asked.
‘I’m seeing Lizzie tomorrow. Her boyfriend is monopolising her tonight.’
‘Boyfriend. Please tell me some good news about the boyfriend.’
‘Although he’s better-looking than Johnny Depp, he’s substantially poorer.’
‘Substantially poorer than me?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Please. Try again.’
‘Although his eyes are hypnotically gorgeous, his job as a motorcycle courier exposes him to considerable personal danger in this city of terrible drivers and bloody accidents.’
‘Now tell me how you have interfered with his brake cables and you will put me in a good mood.’
After I had assured Hans of Arturo’s imminent demise he agreed to come with me. We walked to an old-fashioned wooden bar with sleepy fans swirling around the ceiling. We avoided the long counter and sat in the corner. It was nine in the evening, early for Buenos Aires, and there were only three or four others in the place.
An elderly bartender was polishing glasses, elegant in his white shirt and black bowtie. Hans went to demonstrate his Spanish-class proficiency and came back with two small glasses of greenish-brown liquid which he placed nonchalantly on the table.
‘What the fuck is this?’
‘Fernet. The national drink.’
‘I believe I asked for a beer.’
‘Look around you. This is the real Argentina. It’s not a place for a beer.’
‘They have beers. I can see them in the fridge. What are you talking about? Everyone I can see is drinking a beer.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘I’ve drunk this before,’ I said.
‘So have I,’ he said sorrowfully.
‘Don’t they normally have it with coke?’
‘This is the real Argentina,’ he repeated.
We sat there, sipping, wincing, looking around us. It was quiet. I couldn’t see anyone who looked like my idea of an Alejandro.
Halfway through our Fernets I stood up and ordered us a bottle of wine. We finished it slowly. I liked being with Hans. Conversation was like playing tennis, with little breaks between rallies when we found out about each other. We always had the good grace to resume the game at the saddest moments of the conversation.
His sadness, like mine, like so many men’s, was over a woman, a woman he had lost through carelessness and becoming caught up in a job (the difference being that his had earned him lots of money and that I had liked mine). He had been an analyst for a stockbroker’s in Frankfurt, working sixteen hours a day six days a week before he quit. I turned off when he began to talk passionately of the beauty of pure algebra. Other people had tried that on me, including one or two Hollywood movies. Hans was travelling for another four months before he would go home for his sister’s wedding, to the village near Hamburg where he had grown up. After that, he didn’t know what he would do. His travels around South America had not led to the epiphany he’d hoped for. I wasn’t surprised by that: I thought then that epiphanies were a narrative convention encouraged by teachers of creative writing degrees.
‘You’re shocked that changing location every couple of weeks, constantly getting drunk with strangers and doing no work at all isn’t focusing your mind?’ I asked.
‘When you put it like that, fuck you.’
I was beginning to get quite drunk and armed with this courage I approached the barman and asked him if he knew Alejandro Montenegro. ‘No lo conozco, conozco a muchos Alejandros. ¿Como es?’
